No One Lived in SoHo. Then the Artists Moved in.

Aaron Shkuda ‘s The
Lofts of SoHo: Gentrification, Art, and Industry in New York,
1950-1980 tells the story of a remarkable transformation of a
run-down industrial area in New York City located South of Houston
Street in lower Manhattan. Starting in the 1950s, artists moved into
industrial spaces and created a colony where they could produce,
display, and sell their art. Shkuda explains how this group of
adventurous and resourceful artists managed to create not just a
trendy neighborhood in an area slated for the wrecking ball, but a
whole new style of urban living.

Shkuda is project manager of the
Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the
Humanities at Princeton University. In 1997, he was a student in
David O’Connor’s Advanced Placement European History class at
Paul D. Schreiber High School in Port Washington, NY. David O’Connor
interviewed his former student for the History News Network.

David O’Connor: Before reading
The Lofts of Soho, I didn’t know that the area
South of Houston Street in Manhattan wasn’t always known as SoHo.
How did the name develop?

Aaron Shkuda: As far as I can
tell, the use of the name evolved organically. You start to see the
blocks South of Houston Street called “SoHo” around 1970,
particularly when the press covered the growing group of art
galleries that opened in the area. Some artists didn’t like the
name – they felt that it was an attempt by the more bourgeois
members of the community to “brand” the neighborhood. Though its
existence clearly played some role, there is no direct connection
with London’s Soho.

At the end of the book you note that
many cities have latched on to the use of catchy names like SoHo for
up-and-coming neighborhoods. Can you give some examples?

It’s hard to find a city in the
United States, or even internationally, without a “SoHo-type name.”
The podcast 99% Invisiblerecently
coined this the “acroname.”
Some are well established, such as Tribeca (The Triangle Below Canal
Street) and DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) in New
York, SoCo (South of Congress) in Austin, SoFi (South of Fifth) in
Miami, and SoMa (South of Market) in San Francisco. There’s even a
Palermo SoHo in Buenos Aires. Others are clearly fictions invented by
developers, or purely used ironically, such as BoCoCa (Boerum Hill,
Cobble Hill, and Carroll Gardens) in Brooklyn and Skidrokyo
(the area where Skid Row meets Little Toyko) in Los Angeles. There
was even an episode of South Park about SoDoSoPa (South of
Downtown South Park). These names can be funny, but they mask the
complex historical processes that shaped SoHo and make the contingent
nature of its development seem inevitable.

The Lofts of SoHo extensively
explores the role that artists played in SoHo’s transformation, but
it also analyzes larger issues that were shaping post-World War II
New York, including deindustrialization, race relations, and urban
blight. Explain some of these factors and how they actually helped
the artists who ultimately played a role in revitalizing SoHo.

The question of how gentrification
relates to what scholars have called “the urban crisis” shaped my
research from the beginning. In the summer recess before my second
year of graduate school, I was reading Jonathan Mahler’s Ladies
And Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and
the Battle for the Soul of a City. There are two pages in the
book that describe how the iconic gourmet food store Dean &
DeLuca opened in SoHo while New York was in its deepest moment of
decline. It struck me that SoHo might be perfect way to explore how
gentrification arose during a period of urban crisis.

All of the pillars of the urban crisis,
deindustrialization, urban renewal, and “white flight,” shaped
the development of SoHo from an industrial area to an artist colony,
and then to a relatively upscale residential neighborhood. Artists
were able to find loft space to rent because units were increasingly
being left vacant by the migration of industrial jobs outside of New
York City. The neighborhood began its transition to a residential
neighborhood only after plans for two urban renewal proposals, an
expressway and later a middle-income housing project, had been
defeated. City leaders eventually looked favorably on the type of
urban development artists undertook in SoHo in part because they
provided a way to upgrade property and increase local tax revenue
without the social or financial costs of slum clearance urban
renewal. The dynamism of SoHo also indicated that some people did
want to live in certain neighborhoods that planners had considered
“blighted.”

From our twenty-first-century
vantage point, SoHo’s industries appear hopelessly doomed. You
point out some obvious shortcomings like the inefficiencies of
vertical manufacturing and the lack of easy truck access to loading
docks. However, there were some groups in the 50s and 60s that
fought to protect those industries from the wrecking ball of urban
planning. How did these efforts help the artists’ efforts to
create a colony for themselves alongside these antiquated industries?

There’s a plaque on Prince Street,
just off W. Broadway, honoring Chester Rapkin as “The Father of
SoHo.” Rapkin was a professor of Urban Planning at the University
of Pennsylvania and later Princeton. In 1962 a group called the
Middle Income Cooperators of Greenwich Village (MICOVE) sponsored a
plan to raze much of SoHo and replace it with a middle-income housing
project. In response, the City Planning Commission asked Rapkin to
study the neighborhood. He found that some businesses were
struggling, and all dealt with the inefficiencies of running a 21st
century business in a 19th century structure. Yet he also argued that
SoHo was an important incubator for industrial jobs, particularly for
African American and Latino New Yorkers. It was the desire to
preserve these positions that saved SoHo from the wrecking ball.

Of course, there’s some irony here.
Although SoHo did not see the displacement of residents that often
comes with gentrification (mainly because no one previously lived in
SoHo), the residential population eventually supplanted some
businesses that provided jobs to lower income workers of color.

The Lofts of SoHo pays
a lot of attention to a road that was never built: the Lower
Manhattan Expressway, a plan developed and pushed by Robert Moses.
How did a road that never got off the drawing board play such an
important role in the development of SoHo?

Both the threat and failure of the
Lower Manhattan Expressway were important for SoHo’s development.
There’s little chance that SoHo would have developed into an artist
colony or gentrified residential neighborhood if it had been bisected
by a ten-lane highway. The construction noise and dust alone would
have sent residents scurrying away. The threat of the highway was
also critical. From just after World War II through 1970 the threat
of the project depressed rents and gave local businesses little
incentive to maintain their properties. There was a good chance they
would soon be condemned by the city. There is even a specific case of
a landlord renting to artists in order to increase his rent rolls,
and thus his compensation from the city in slum clearance
proceedings. As soon as the Lower Manhattan Expressway was tabled for
good, the neighborhood underwent a commercial and residential
renaissance.

What kinds of difficulties did the
artists face when they began moving into the industrial lofts in
lower Manhattan? Why were these old industrial structures so
attractive to the artists?

Artists faced practical, physical, and
legal challenges. The first residents inhabited unimproved industrial
space. At best, their lofts were completely empty, and basic
necessities such as working bathrooms and kitchens had to be
installed. At worst, their lofts were filled with industrial debris
and were in need of basic structural repairs. Even the simplest tasks
such as disposing of garbage could be a challenge because living in a
loft was illegal. New York City’s Zoning Ordinance required the
separation of industrial and residential uses of buildings, and most
SoHo artists moved into loft units in buildings where industrial
activity was taking place. The New York State Multiple Dwelling Law
required that all apartments have safety features that lofts did not
possess. Taking trash out to a dumpster was like sending a beacon to
a city inspector, and most artists had to undertake loft renovations
themselves.

As a reward for taking on the risk of
living in a loft, SoHo artists got a space that was inexpensive and
useful. Through the early 1970s, one could rent a loft for a few
hundred dollars a month, or purchase one for under $30,000. Lofts
were large enough to function both as studios and residences, and
their open interiors were ideal for those who painted on large
canvases, used industrial production methods in their art, or
incorporated performance elements into their work. Lofts became
stages, and SoHo was a center for dance and performance art.

Your portrait of many of the artists
defies expectations. Far from being hapless bohemians, they became
each other’s plumbers, carpenters, electricians, designers and
marketing strategists. Were you surprised by any of the roles they
took on?

Not being a handy person myself, I was
always fascinated by the many artists who looked at a loft with a
broken machine in the corner, maybe an oil slick in the middle of the
floor, and said, “Yep, I could live here!” But most residents I
interviewed tended to downplay the effort it took to make a loft
livable. True, some of the early lofts were functional at best, and
many artists relied on a knowledgeable community of friends and
neighbors to complete renovations, but sometimes I think it was more
of a challenge than they let on!

You make the point throughout the
book that the artists moving into these former industrial lofts was
illegal. How did the artists organize themselves to be able to
continue living in buildings, despite the zoning laws that clearly
forbade residences in the area? What kinds of arguments did they
make to bolster their case?

One of the most interesting aspects of
the SoHo story was the tenacity and creativity of artist advocacy. As
early as 1961, the New York City Fire and Buildings Departments
threatened artists moving into SoHo with eviction. These agencies
were mainly just trying to do their job – from a legal standpoint,
SoHo artists didn’t really have a leg to stand on, and it’s easy
to see why a public official would be concerned about a group of
people deciding to live in unheated firetraps where industrial
activity was taking place. From a contemporary perspective, this was
also the most shocking discovery about SoHo’s history. Thanks to
the work of Richard Florida and the National Endowment for the Arts
Our
Town program, which funds creative placemaking
projects, the idea that artists are good for cities feels almost
axiomatic. It was shocking to learn about a group of city officials
looking to evict artists for attempting to improve vacant industrial
property!

The arguments that artist groups made
anticipated the current discourse around creative placemaking and the
creative class. The first group, the Artist Tenants Association,
argued that the arts were “big business in New York. They linked
loft tenants to the New York School of abstract expressionist
painting, which secured New York’s place as the center of the art
world, and the museums and galleries that pumped money into the
city’s economy. The second group, the SoHo Artists Association,
infused a language of real estate into their advocacy. They worked to
bring outsiders into SoHo to demonstrate the vibrancy that loft
conversions brought to this struggling industrial area, and
explicitly made the argument that artists were making Lower Manhattan
attractive to a wider range of “creative” professionals.

The Lofts of SoHo describes the
development of a whole new style of urban residential space. What
were some of the aesthetic and practical features of “loft living,”
and what made it so attractive?

The lure of lofts starts with their
size – 3,600 square feet was considered a smaller loft, and these
spaces dwarfed the postwar New York City apartment. Lofts’ large
windows let in a lot of light, good for painting as well as living.
Because loft spaces were un-partitioned, and the first artist tenants
did not have the time or the money for a full renovation, lofts were
by necessity rather minimally decorated and left many of the
industrial features of the spaces intact. SoHo residents added their
artistic flourishes to create an interior design aesthetic that
combined minimalism, industry, and art. Once you’ve seen an early
SoHo loft, it’s hard not to find this aesthetic everywhere – it’s
particularly common in restaurants, (think exposed wood floor beams,
minimally finished floors, mismatched tables, and industrial light
fixtures). Flexibility was also an important feature – it was
common for loft residents to put up and take down walls when they had
children or needed another studio space.

I thought it was kind of ironic that
a group of architectural preservationists in NYC helped save the
buildings that the artists redesigned to create this “loft living.”
Can you explain the role that the NYC Landmarks Commission played in
saving so many building in SoHo?

While artists upgraded the interiors of
loft buildings, historic preservationists rehabilitated the
reputation of loft exteriors, specifically their cast-iron facades.
Before 1970, the general public mostly ignored the area below Houston
Street. Some called it “The Valley” due its location between the
high rises of Lower Manhattan and Midtown, while others referred to
it as “Hell’s Hundred Acres” because of its high rate of fire.
Preservationists like Margot Gayle and the Friends of Cast-Iron
Architecture, as well as New York Times critic Ada Louis
Huxtable, made the argument that the area’s 19th-century
cast-iron facades were both architecturally interesting (they contain
a high degree of ornamentation) and historically important (they were
industrially fabricated and an important forerunner to the
20th-century skyscraper). Thanks to their efforts, the Landmarks
Preservation Commission made the SoHo Cast-Iron Historic District a
landmark in 1973. This has profound implications for the
neighborhood’s development. Because the buildings are landmarked,
they cannot be torn down or substantially altered, which discouraged
larger developers from entering the SoHo market, causing the area’s
gentrification to occur in a more piecemeal fashion.

You explain how the artists were
able to revitalize SoHo only to become victims of their own success.
The “embourgeoisement of SoHo” leads to many of the artists
getting priced out of the neighborhood that they helped revitalize.
You say that many of the residents who replace the artists in SoHo
were part of what you call the “creative class.” Who were part
of this class and how did they come to displace the artists? Is this
an inevitable consequence of gentrification?

One very practical question that
interested me was: how did people outside of the artist community
find out about SoHo? What made them want to live in a loft? Part of
the answer to this question was that artists’ advocacy groups
invited people into their homes to convince them to support
legislation legalizing loft housing. Artists hosting performances or
looking to sell their works also had an incentive to draw people to
SoHo. Those likely to attend these events, or have a connection to
the art community, tended to be people in so-called “creative”
professions, such as architecture, advertising, and academia. These
tended to be the earliest non-artists living in SoHo.

Displacement is a trickier issue. Some
artists bought their lofts through cooperatives for modest prices in
the late 60s or early 70s. A decent number of them remain to this
day, and others were able to cash out for a substantial profit. When
demand for legal lofts outstripped supply in the mid-1970s, some
artists were forced out. But the agents of this change were often
artists with knowledge of the loft market, or longtime industrial
building owners whose families might have owned their properties for
generations. They were the ones “flipping” properties and forcing
less affluent artists and industrial businesses out. Some of the new
tenants were wealthier professionals, or members of the “creative
class,” but some were wealthier artists.

One of the issues that your book
raises that I found so interesting was the limited role of government
in SoHo’s revitalization. Your work tacitly makes the case that
government inaction is what saved SoHo. Throughout the book, it
seems that the artists wanted government to stand aside and let them
do what they wanted to do. Did this surprise you at all?

I think this is part of the reason that
so many cities (New York included) are looking for “The Next SoHo.”
The first SoHo developed organically and cost government very little.
As you write, government inaction mattered more. Policymakers only
acted to legalize loft housing for artists because advocacy groups
pushed them into action. Other times, city leaders seemed content to
let loft tenants live illegally. Though there were threats of
evictions, few if any took place. This was despite a survey completed
by the City Planning Commission in December 1977 that found that 91.5
percent of recent loft conversions in Manhattan below Fifty-Ninth
Street were illegal. To this day, many loft residents are technically
living illegally. It remains a requirement that at least one resident
still must be an artist certified by the Department of Cultural
Affairs to live in SoHo and there are numerous residents with no
connection to the arts. In fact, some non-artists had trouble getting
financing for high-end loft purchases during the credit crunch after
2008. However, there has never been the political will to bring SoHo
residents into compliance with the law through evictions. This was
never a conscious decision, but clearly the incentives to allow SoHo
residents to remain in their lofts are numerous, both in the 1970s
and today.

When you left Port Washington in
1999, you were headed off to the University of Chicago to study
Russian history. Why did you turn your attention to urban history?
What attracted you to undertake this work on the changes in SoHo in
New York City?

Cities have always captivated me. I
lived in New York City until I was 10, and like many suburban kids
arriving at college, I maintained that I was really from
Manhattan. I chose to attend the University of Chicago in part
because of its urban location, not knowing that it was the place
where the academic study of the city began nearly 80 years prior.
Much of my undergraduate work was on Russian history – I was
fascinated by the grand social experiment that was the Soviet Union.
But my education was interdisciplinary at heart, and part of what
attracted me (and continues to interest me) about cities is that they
can be studied using a variety of different methodologies.

In my final year of college, I took
George Chauncey’s class on Postwar American Culture where we
read some of the classic works of postwar American urban history,
including Arnold Hirsch’s Making the Second Ghetto and Tom
Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis. When I went to
work at a small policy advocacy organization in Chicago after
graduation, I saw how many of the issues outlined in these books
shaped the lives of urban residents in the present. Yet one major
process transforming cities like New York and Chicago was absent from
most histories I read: gentrification. I decided to return to
graduate school to study the historical roots of this process.

What projects are coming up next for
you?

I remain interested in how the economy,
politics, and built environment of cities reoriented after World War
II. I am currently researching plans to construct new buildings and
trading floors for institutions such as the New York Stock Exchange
and Chicago Board of Trade. With the securities industry, there are
interesting spatial questions that arise due to new technologies
required to run modern markets. In the 1960s and 70s, securities
exchanges developed computer systems that first required a large
amount of space, but simultaneously created the potential for these
markets to move away from the city altogether. This research is a far
cry from the art world, but I am interested in why financial services
sector plays such an outsized role in the contemporary city, in a way
that is similar to the emphasis on artistic production and
“creativity.” I find myself asking similar questions in this
project, including: how do changes in the economy play out in the use
of the built environment, how do various actors seek to position
their cities to remain competitive in a postindustrial age, and how
policies on a local and national level shape these processes?